The Translator’s Invisibility

the two characteristics of a good translation are, that it should be faithful, and that it should be unconstrained. Faithful, as well in rendering correctly the meaning of the original, as in exhibiting the general spirit which pervades it: unconstrained, so as not to betray by its phraseology, by the collocation of its words, or construction of its sentences that it is only a copy.

(Quarterly Review 1823:53)

A fluent strategy can be associated with fidelity because the effect of transparency conceals the translator’s interpretation of the foreign text, the semantic context he has constructed in the translation according to target-language cultural values. Rose’s fluent translation was praised for “rendering correctly the meaning of the original” because it assimilated the Italian text to English values, not only the valorization of “unconstrained” language, but also the interpretation of Ariosto’s poem that currently prevailed in the target culture. And, once again, the dominion of fluency entailed that canonical texts, the ancient and modern texts in which the sense of original authorship was felt to be most pronounced, would {79} possess stylistic simplicity. The reviewer for the London Magazine declared that Orlando Furioso is characterized by “this exquisite simplicity, which bears the distinctive mark of a superior genius” (London Magazine 1824:626).

In Frere’s case, fluency meant a linguistic homogenization that avoided, not merely archaism, but “associations exclusively belonging to modern manners,” generalizing the foreign text by removing as many of the historically specific markers as possible. The translator must,

if he is capable of executing his task upon a philosophic principle, endeavour to resolve the personal and local allusions into the genera, of which the local or personal variety employed by the original author, is merely the accidental type; and to reproduce them in one of those permanent forms which are connected with the universal and immutable habits of mankind.

(Frere 1820:482)

Frere rationalized these admitted “liberties” by appealing to a “philosophic principle”:

The proper domain of the Translator is, we conceive, to be found in that vast mass of feeling, passion, interest, action and habit which is common to mankind in all countries and in all ages; and which, in all languages, is invested with its appropriate forms of expression, capable of representing it in all its infinite varieties, in all the permanent distinctions of age, profession and temperament.

(ibid.:481)

In Frere’s view, a fluent strategy enables the translation to be a transparent representation of the eternal human verities expressed by the foreign author.